The Pans I Carried to the Band

What My Mother Paid For

I need you to understand what that food was before I tell you what I did with it. The food is the whole thing.

My mother is a lunch lady. She has run the kitchen at Marshall County Elementary for twenty-two years. That means she has fed other people’s children for twenty-two years on a budget that would make a grown man cry, and she has never once let a child come through her line and get nothing.

When I got engaged to Reed, she sat down at her own kitchen table with a legal pad and a church cookbook. She planned my wedding supper the way she plans the first week of school.

She did not have the money for a caterer. She had the money for food, and her own two hands, and a fellowship hall full of women who would help if she asked.

She asked. They came.

For three days before the wedding, my mother and her sisters and half the Homemakers Club cooked in the church kitchen in southern Tennessee. It was the first week of June, hot already, the windows open and the box fans going in every corner.

They made enough food for every soul who had said they were coming, and then a good forty plates past that. My mother does not believe in running out. She thinks running out of food at your own table is a kind of shame you do not get back.

Brisket she smoked herself in a borrowed trailer rig behind the parsonage. Two hams. The pulled pork. Green beans with the ham hock, the way her own mother made them. Creamed corn out of the deep freeze from last summer’s garden.

A whole table of the casseroles that only exist at a Baptist potluck. The ones with the cracker tops and the cans of soup. The ones nobody will admit to loving and everybody takes seconds of.

She made rolls. Four hundred rolls.

I watched her punch the dough down on Thursday night with her glasses fogging up over the bowl. I asked her why she did not just buy them from the Kroger over in Lewisburg.

She looked at me like I had asked her why she did not just buy me instead of raising me.

“Because they’ll taste the difference,” she said. “Even if they can’t name it, they’ll taste it.”

On the morning of the wedding I came by the church early to drop off the programs. The kitchen was already full of steam and women in aprons over their church dresses.

My Aunt Reba was slicing ham. My mother was counting rolls into baskets lined with the good tea towels. Mrs. Pyle from the Homemakers Club was stirring a roaster of green beans with a wooden spoon the size of a canoe paddle.

Nobody was getting paid. They were there because my mother had fed their kids in that school cafeteria for twenty-two years, and because that is what women do for each other in a town this size.

“Get out of my kitchen, bride,” my mother said, without even looking up. “You’ll get grease on you.”

I got grease on me anyway. I hugged her and I got a streak of ham fat across my shoulder, and she scolded me, and she was smiling the whole time she did it.

That is the food Verlene had in the back of her truck. Not scraps. Not leftovers. The supper.

My mother’s three days of work, and a whole morning of those women’s hands, loaded up in the dark by a woman who had brought a pecan pie and a card with forty dollars in it.